Dulce et Decorum Est
by thermodynamic
Summary: Soda was a good soldier.


This is... dark. Warning in advance for drug abuse, homophobic and racist slurs/attitudes, graphic violence, (thoughts) of hurting children, and a general PTSD shitshow.

* * *

Being drunk makes the world run in slow, suspended motion. Makes you forget; not nearly as much as the horse you're craving, but it's a hell of a lot easier to go through your daddy's bursting-at-the-seams liquor cabinet than get a hold of your dealer, lately. You stumble over to the crib. Darry shouldn't have left you in charge of her, this fragile, breakable baby, while he takes a wife he doesn't love out on a dinner date he can't afford. You killed babies like her with napalm, gook babies, babies that don't matter. Light 'em up, boys. There's no crying in Nam.

Darry named her Frannie, after your mother. You can't stand to look at her too long. You imagine your beautiful, golden mother taking your face into her hands, sweeping the hair off your forehead, and asking, _When are you planning to get your shit together, son? Huh?_ She was the baddest fucking woman you ever knew. When she found out she was having you, she threw all of your daddy's clothes onto the lawn and said she'd bounce with her kids if he didn't quit his gang. She threatened to tan Dally's hide good if he didn't stay out of the pen, and he actually listened to her. Your second-grade teacher said you'd never learn how to read, and she sat down at the kitchen table with you every day until you damn well did. If she saw you right now, she'd kick your ass so hard, you'd have a permanent footprint.

 _Steve's goin' to community college with the GI Bill, gettin' his degree,_ Mom says, a horrifying mirage. You can't see her the way you did in life, but only in death, her body broken after flying through the windshield. Her eyes— Ponyboy's eyes, but with none of the dreamy softness— bore straight into you. _Even Two-Bit dragged some poor Vietnamese girl home with him and decided to make a family. And what are you doin' with yourself? Shootin' up dope all day on your big brother's dime. You think that's fucking acceptable, Sodapop Patrick Curtis?_

She always did have a way of making you feel so small, but you know how pathetic you are better than anyone else possibly could, Ma. So you bat her aside and turn to your daddy, dressed in the army uniform your mama slashed with a knife after he came home, his hair grown out defiantly long again. He calls you a capitalist white supremacist imperialist pig, a traitor to your own kind. Then he spits at you.

Well, he can judge you all he wants, but his union rabble-rousing only came after years and years spent pushing dope to the same Indians his heart bleeds for. So you banish him too, drift off into the comfortable hinterland of the war, the last place you were ever happy. You dream in Vietnamese, lately, nasal vowels that blur together; you were never much good in school, but you were a quick study at this, phrases you learned out of a book with humid, wrinkled pages and trickling ink. It's funny, how the pressure made sense of your dyslexic muddle of a mind. It's funny, how people change.

 _Giơ tay lên hay tôi bắn._ Hands up or I shoot.

 _Đồ khốn nạn._ Fuck you.

 _Anh yêu em._ I love you.

 _Giết tôi đi._ Kill me.

 _Tôi là của bạn._ I'm yours.

Lien tells you the last one a lot, far more beautiful and terrible than she'd been in life, when you're trapped at the hazy border between memory and reality— especially when there's a needle hanging out of your arm and your tongue's dangling from the corner of your mouth. _Tôi là của bạn_ , she says, pacing back and forth in her underwear, chainsmoking cigarette after cigarette. She throws her arms around your neck, trying to entice you with the curves of her body, but you can feel every rib through her skin. There's just not enough, at home. Can't you spare some more, just a little more? Her mother's got TB. Her father's in a prison camp. Her big brother's had his legs blown off by a mine. She weaves stories with the same ease you do, until it no longer matters if they're true or not— they replace the truth, they become it.

 _Anh yêu em_ , you say stupidly, a phrase you hadn't meant when you told your high school girlfriend, her belly swollen with some other man's baby. (For all you know, maybe Lien says the same thing to your baby every night now— there's a million men just like you, scattering their seed all over Vietnam and never looking back at their half-caste kids.) Anything. You'll give her anything, as long as she stays here, warm and tangible with you.

Thank you, she says in her Catholic school English, tripping over the syllables, and then she straddles you and starts to shuck her bra. Thank you. Thank you.

They warned you back in Saigon that sleeping with any of the local tricks would give you black syphillis, some kind of desperate anti-rape measure, but you'd liked her. You'd liked her a lot. Not love, though— you hadn't meant that. You don't love anyone.

"Ain't that real fuckin' funny," you tell Frannie— she gurgles, flat on her back, too young to comprehend a fraction of the turmoil in her family. "You know what problem I had when I was a kid? I felt everything so hard it ripped me apart— I loved so hard it ruined me. And now? Goddamn. It's like bein' trapped inside a glass jar and there's no way out."

Raw need is twisting up in you like a bayonet in a Vietnamese woman's stomach, and you force your fist into your mouth, bite down _hard_. The skin splits; bloodflood. You roll up your sleeve, too, show off the track marks to the baby, battle scars. "Maybe it's just the dope talkin'," you say with a bleak chuckle. "But I can't live with it any other way, you know, my brain keeps runnin' and runnin' and runnin' and runnin'—"

Horseflies. Army rations dissolving in your mouth, chalky, impossible to swallow. Heat like breathing in cement, the dampness like tears you'll never let fall on your face. Two bullets to the skull, one in the torso, and the only thing you care about is the waste of ammo.

See, you've got a real touching story about your good old dead buddy Johnny, one you could tell at one of them anti-war rallies where they jam flowers into guns and shit. You make yourself remember it like pressing down on a bruise, remember that it hurts. Here's how the story's supposed to go.

You shot a boy your age dead when you were on patrol one night, the mosquitoes in your ears indistinguishable from bullets whizzing past your head. Maybe he had a grenade, you thought, and pulled the trigger with a deafening crack before you could think again. Turned out he had nothing at all. His hands were gentle as you kicked his corpse over, his mouth soft, his eyes staring into the empty vault of the sky. It looked like your buddy Johnny's body, thousands of miles away in Tulsa, and you vomited at the memory. Johnny would've run down to Tijuana, married a woman off the street, sat in a prison cell, shoved a barrel into his own mouth. It's a good thing he died before he could reach Khe Sanh, because this place would've shattered him more than his father's blows ever did.

Here's how it actually went.

You shot a boy your age dead when you were on patrol one night, the mosquitoes in your ears indistinguishable from bullets whizzing past your head. Maybe he had a grenade, you thought, and pulled the trigger with a deafening crack before you could think again. Turned out he had nothing at all. His hands were gentle as you kicked his corpse over, his mouth soft, his eyes staring into the empty vault of the sky. It looked like your buddy Johnny's body, thousands of miles away in Tulsa, and you vomited at the memory. Because Johnny, according to Ponyboy's fragmented recollections, was nothing at all like this fragile-boned little queer. He would've pumped him full of lead in an instant, his face lit up with delight, and never felt more alive than he did in that moment. It's a good thing he died before he could reach Khe Sanh, because Khe Sanh would still be reeling from the shock.

The truth you don't want to admit is that Nam didn't turn you into a monster. Nam only brought out the monsters already lurking inside of you, gave them a useful and exploitable conduit.

Stop crying. Stop crying. Stop crying. You're a man, not a fag, so start acting like it. There's no crying in Nam. What right do you have to cry when there's a mother crying harder than yours did when you tore your leg open at rodeo, looking at her son's broken body. Why the hell do you think you have the right to feel anything. You're a soldier and you were a good soldier. Soldiers don't cry.

You see the baby. You see Darry's beautiful, perfect little baby, with your mother's name. She's pure right now. Nothing has ever hurt her.

You think about putting your hands around her neck and squeezing until her face turns blue.

Oh God. God, you _are_ a monster, it's true, you left your last scraps of humanity somewhere in the jungle and came home an empty husk, you're a killer, you're blighted from birth, you're beyond redemption, you—

break open the liquor cabinet again and grab a bottle of whiskey, unscrew the cap, chug it without even noticing it scorch your throat raw. And the relief floods you instantaneously, sinking into your limbs and slackening every tight place inside of you, and you think nothing.

Darry finds you a couple hours later. He doesn't ever let you watch the baby again.


End file.
